Pork and Berries and Opium!

Direct mail advertisement Crisco 1916.

Well, back in 2003, the first item I pulled from the old Victorian trunk that contained The Nicholson Family Letters was this Direct Mail Ad, from 1916, addressed to Mrs. N. Nicholson.

Lucky I did, because it piqued my curiosity. I could see it was an interesting item, pretending to be a friendly letter from the neighbourhood grocery, but really part of a slick  advertising campaign. Lots of North American women got this very ad, I’m sure. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps.

It came out of Chicago.

I did some research and decided it was likely an early campaign of female advertising legend Helen Landsdowne Resor of J. Walter Thompson. Apparently her signature style was to appeal directly to the homemaker with a three paneled brochure with a coupon. This Crisco ad fit the bill.

But today I read the small print that said Copyright J T N Mitchell Chicago. Another advertising man.

It is possible that Resor did this, before she was hired by J. Walter Thompson. She would have been a Landsdowne then.

Her Wikipedia entry says that the New York Daily News did a profile of her, as a top  advertiser, but all I can find are wedding and death notices.

Well, I’m glad I found I first. The trunk was under a shelf, so I could only open it a few inches and stick my hand in.

Yesterday, I went over the Nicholson house accounts, 1883-1921, for my book Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl. I am writing a digital trilogy about Margaret’s three daughters, all ‘new women’ of the era.

Margaret did not change over to Crisco, I have her 1917 butter bill.

What struck me this time, was that the Nicholsons ate very well, even when struggling financially. Beef, pork, chicken (a relative luxury) turkey, lamb, canned cod and salmon, fresh fish earlier on. Lots of Haddie (haddock) a national dish. Oatmeal, oatmeal, oatmeal and I bet it tasted WAY better than the 1 minute crap we buy today. They seemed to sweeten more with molasses and honey than refined sugar. And all that opium in their sodas. Yum!

Pears, apples, bananas! (yes) and all kinds of  berries in season. Fresh veggies from the garden. And Margaret was a master baker, like so many of the Scots. (Now, their garden was not organic; they used  the Paris Green a lot. (It’s in my Threshold Girl book.)

In 1908 some local cows trampled their garden and Norman wanted to sue if the damage was over 2.00.

My gosh, everything must have tasted to good. Everything slow cooked in the wood oven.

When the girls were living in the city, they were always pleased when Mom sent in a “Care Package.” They were all becoming de-skilled. Their own daughters would feed their kids on canned garbage in the sixties.

I once heard Jamie Oliver say, on the BBC, that the middle class, today, never had it so good, with respect to food. (And the poor are worse off.) He’s wrong with respect to the middle class in towns at the turn of the last century. They may not have had the selection of foods, like we have today,  but the quality was amazing no doubt. And they knew what to do with it.

The back of Tighsolas in Richmond, Quebec, where the garden would have been.

Tighsolas Still Life

A Nicholson flat iron (that I use as a bedroom doorstop) with a statuette (Royal Doulton?) once belonging to Margaret Nicholson’s grand daughter, on a piece of lace once belonging to the Nicholsons, with pic of Tighsolas.

Anyway, I found this tidbit in the 1909 Montreal Gazette Archive.

“In conjunction with Mr. Henry Morgan and Company, the Montreal Light, Heat and Power Company will give an exhibit and demonstration of electric cooking and heating devices, broilers, toasters, chafing dishes, etc.

A special feature will be the use of the electric iron.”

You can see one of the Nicholson flat irons in the pic above. (I also have a kitchen chair with an anvil shaped burn in seat from the Nicholsons!)

Well, I have a letter from 1909, Margaret to Norman, saying that it took two days for Flora to wash and iron her white dress.

That flat iron weighs at least 10 pounds! And Flora was a teeny tiny whisp of a girl, the ‘frail one.’

The Nicholson’s electrified Tigsholas in 1913. I have all the information. At least, they set it up for light. I also had invoices from Richmond Electric that is also trying to get people to cook with electricity.

I doubt that Margaret ever gave up her wood stove, at least willingly. She lived in Tighsolas until 1936, with a companion, a Mrs. Greene: I have the Depression Era letters. (Her sister, Sarah, writes her from Sarnia saying she never thought she’d see the day when there would be grown men begging in the street.)

Her granddaughter, Marion, recalls stealing doughnuts off the stove as they were cooling, from an upstairs bedroom, by using a hook through a hole in the floor. This would be in the late twenties. She loved to visit Tighsolas as a child, but found Sundays boring. Margaret did nothing on the Sabbath.

Today, I have a totally electric home and when the electricity goes off I am totally helpless. Well, I can use the BBQ…but no Internet!

But I recall, sometimes in my childhood, when we went to the country, say for a lake vacation, the cottages had woodstoves. My brothers and I loved playing with the hooky things and the heavy back iron, whatchamacallits, plates? I should learn the terms if I am going to write authentically above Tighsolas in 1910.

I wish I could turn on the TV to the LIFE channel and watch a 1910 cooking show, starring Margaret Nicholson. Revealing all her tricks. She was possessive when it came to her recipes, apparently. If someone asked for one of her recipes, she left out something, or changed something. Maybe someone already has a video on YouTube, How to Cook with a Woodstove. (One minute while I check…)

…Hmm. No videos, pers se. I understand that any good cook is a scientist, of sorts, a chemist, who innately comprehends the chemical properties of starches and oils and proteins, but from what I read, someone who cooked in the 1900 era was something of an engineer, keeping the fire going and heat flowing in the oven, opening flues and moving the pots around in the oven and over the stove top. I will definitely write a paragraph or two describing Margaret as she expertly manipulates her cooking materials, effortlessly, majestically, like a conductor over his (sic) symphony.

And then, apparently, a person had to clean the stove each day. Not only clean out the ash pan, but also polish the stove so it didn’t rust. Well, Stove Polish was a product purchased by the Nicholsons. No wonder.